John Rayner

Rabbi John Desmond Rayner CBE (30 May 1924 – 19 September 2005) was born in Berlin as Hans Sigismund Rahmer. He left Berlin in 1939 on one of the last Kindertransports. There were about 10,000 children on the train. Both his parents, Ferdinand Rahmer and Charlotte Landshut, died in the Holocaust.

Between 1943 and 1947 Rayner served in the British Army. In October 1947 he took up an open scholarship in modern languages that he had previously won at Emmanuel College, Cambridge five years earlier. In his second year he switched to Moral Science which comprised philosophy, logic, ethics and psychology and graduated in 1950 with First Class Honours. In his third year Rayner specialised in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac and Semitic Epigraphy. In his sixth year Rayner began working as a research student on a thesis about Maimonides' conception of Revelation.

Rayner was ordained in the Liberal Jewish ministry on 21 June 1953 and served the South London Liberal Synagogue, in Streatham until 1957. He then worked at St John's Wood Liberal Synagogue until in 1963 he left for Cincinnati, Ohio, in the United States. Rayner had been invited to the Hebrew Union College to take up a graduate fellowship. He returned to the UK to serve as Minister at the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in June 1965.

He wrote books on diverse topics including halakha, marriage, ethics, Zionism, theology and Jewish-Christian relations. He also gave a large number of sermons. He was voted one of the best preachers in Britain by Harpers and Queen magazine in 1976. During the late 1960s and 1970s Rayner made several appearances on national television and radio.

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